Reflections at the Intersection of American History, Religion, Politics, and Academic Life

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Leon Bostein on the American University and Its Challenges

Bard College

Leon Bostein is the President of Bard College. In this piece published at The Hedgehog Review, he has a lot to say about the state of higher education. This essay is so chock-full of interesting ideas that I will simply quote a few lines below and leave it to you, the faithful The Way of Improvement Home reader, to follow-up over at Hedgehog Review.

In one of our most prestigious universities, where I happened to be
visiting, I came early to the hall (which doubled as a concert venue)
for a rehearsal. A lecture course on Shakespeare was underway, given by
a very famous scholar. I snuck in to catch the last ten minutes. There
were fourteen hundred people in the hall. When the lecture was over,
the undergraduates clapped. But teaching is not a performance art with
passive spectators. Five very hardy, ambitious, and probably obnoxious
undergraduates scrambled to the front of the auditorium in an effort to
ask a question of the lecturer. At that point, a cordon of teaching
assistants rose out of their seats to block access to the professor to
whom the five hungry undergraduates were seeking to pose a question.
One of them broke through the cordon, got to the faculty member, and
before her question was asked, the professor quipped, “talk to my
assistants.” Such habits and practices will be put out of business, and
they should be....

We must not resist, in my view, the idea that the university should be
in the business of being of use. We should not be fighting demands to
be “useful.” We should not assume that some fields of study are
“useless” according to some reductive sense of utility....

It is not at all clear to me that undergraduates will respond to the
terms of that professional conversation and to the way in which we are
accustomed to talking about our subjects, particularly in the
humanities. The most egregious case in point may be in the case of
literature. Teaching a young person that reading is not just stripping
the page for information or a plot, and stopping the reader in his or
her tracks in an early stage to figure out possibilities of meaning are
good things to do....

We are unwilling to face, in an American democratic, egalitarian
context, the public or the politicians, with the real and practical
virtues of the university, which appear inherently discriminatory,
elitist, exclusive, and judgmental. We hide behind the mask of the
university’s populist appeal as an instrument of sports and
entertainment....

By that token we are also complicit with most of the
problems in governance at a university— the failure to have serious
leadership that focuses on teaching and research and that intersects
with cultural and political issues. I cannot name a single university
president in office today who could possibly approach the moral or
political stature of James Bryant Conant or The Rev. Theodore Hesburgh.
Not only the trustees, but the alumni and faculty members, have made
sure that no such person would ever be appointed president. The constituents in a university really do not
want leadership. Faculty enjoy their own authority. We like the absence
of centralized leadership. We want paper pushers and fund-raisers; we
do not want people at the helm guiding the major intellectual functions
of the university. We love our anarchic independence. In this context,
anybody who wants to be a university administrator ought to be
disqualified by definition....

The real advantage of a residential or classroom-based education comes
from the physical reality of the university and the nominal community of
scholars, which rarely really exists. Faculty members in a university
do not actually talk to one another beyond narrow circles of colleagues
or beyond the level of gossip....

In a well-designed curriculum, the teaching material is chosen not
because of its political symbolism or fashion, but because of its
pedagogical power....

The ability to think empathetically about someone who appears not
identical to ourselves, who thinks differently from ourselves is
crucial. Consider the revival of religion in American society. For
those of us who are concerned about the sort of religion that has been
revived, the dangers of fundamentalism, we need to design a curriculum
that offers a deeper immersion in the theological worldviews of all the
great religious traditions. It is hard to get young religious people
to think critically about faith, in a way that seems not to violate the
idea of faith, without close reading of great theological
texts—without reading Augustine, Calvin, Luther, or Aquinas and the
Koran and the central texts of other world religions, including
Judaism....